thelee

well this weekend has been a two step forward one step back kinda thing. i finally had a minor breakthrough in finding a pathing that gets me to level 16 without burning a lot of time redundantly going to fort deadlight/dunnage to cash in a quest and doesn't involve some insanely tricky stealthy on the ashen bridge... ...but while getting to level 16 certainly makes the endgame feasible, it still doesn't make it easy. i spent a whole afternoon just trying to clear the mobs on the ashen bridge, with no luck... it's all about finding the right combination and duration of buffs to actually kill everything even with bad RNG when it comes to galawain's buffs without blowing unnecessary time since I still feel having to sail around to all the different megabosses and final fights will be expensive. ah well, next time have to do 8 minutes of buffing instead of 7... scordeo's edge can't come soon enough (elder flame bat with hardened is surprisingly bullet spongey) level 17 is going to be the next sweet milestone, since that'll get me legendary spiritual weapons and then after that level 19 for minor avatar (the +20% weapon damage buff).

i wonder if it's level dependent? i was level 15 with 14 mechanics plus hylea's if so, then my current run can't benefit from it (my real character is well past your point), but good to know if i completely botch this one.

i was definitely not getting 310-370 xp per trap, more like 30-40 xp. when did you attempt this? what was your mechanics?

FYI - I was attempting some non-ashen maw pathing today and sandswept ruins is frankly a deadend. i actually don't understand how people are getting 3 to 8k in experience there unless you've been avoiding all traps throughout the game. I figured out in the process that there's some sort of "max trap disarming" experience and my character is hitting it after only like 1k of experience. coupled with the fact that it's like a 6-day detour (that I have to repeat to do dorudugan) and it's a non-starter for my run.

this is why i'm doing ashen maw right now. i have like 24 days left, and i'm hoping to see if all of it carries over. a small # of days definitely do carry over, that much can be confirmed.

ha, no worry about that, i'm testing everything. even trivial run-around-for-fetch quests part i rehearse a minimum of two times (one for pathing, one for dress-rehearsal) to make sure there's absolutely no mistake about even hitting the wrong dialogue option. super tedious, but after an early attempt where i did the Upoho Wharo Woods on Maje Island and hit the wrong option and instead of getting Wise Teeth Necklace I entered a fight that was rapidly fatal, I'm making sure everything is pre-planned and well-known. btw, good thing I practiced the giant cave grub. We both forgot about skaen's challenge. You can't range what you can't see. Fortunately, at level 15 the giant cave grub is extremely easy to solo with tactician/skaen - it helps that the giant cave grub is stationary so once adds appear I can duck into the entrance and the giant cave grub is automatically "out of the fight" so I just mule kick both adds and now I have Brilliant on.

I had some time today (out sick) so spent some serious time re-plotting out second part of act 2-3. I'm very, very close to a breakthrough with my practice characters. With my revised plotting I'm like 2k experience away from level 16 and just need to figure out a way to take out Jaderfylas (i'm at ashen maw), which should put me over the top. After that, everything else should fall into place since I'll have Salvation of Time access. Jaderfylas is probably just a matter of patience, but I've been at this all day and didn't feel like putting more time in for now. (Jaderfylas also cheats, even if you keep mule kicking her, she'll still be able to pull off her ability that brings down a meteor swarm and summons magma oozes. This is what made me give up for now.) 8K sounds real good right about now; if i can't figure out Jaderfylas I'll probably load up my practice character before leaving for Ashen Maw and instead cash in some principi quests (hanging sepulchers) and respec so I can do sandswept ruins. I'm a little worried that it'll eat up a lot of time, but a guaranteed level 16 in act 3 with some days burned off is still way better than hitting an absolute deadend. Let me just say though that I'm really curious to know where everyone else is getting their experience. I have to roll the dice on a couple of ship bounties and I have some extremely tricky stealth sections that I'm going to have to practice over and over and over and over again until I can do it in my sleep. And I'd just barely hit level 16 right when I need it (to escape Jade's lair since the stealthing won't work as well). Though sandswept 8k would help quite a bit. By the way, the stealth mechanic is really underrated and way better than in PoE1. The simple yet consistent rules for sound generation and enemy positioning allows for some real emergent gameplay. Hanging sepulchers was my first major stealth headache, and it took probably like 20-30 attempts on my practice character before I pieced together the noises made from traps and scrolls to give me a consistent (if extremely challenging to pull off) way to get one of the eulogies. It was real satisfying to get it to click. For the curious, I recorded my practice character for my own reference since it was really hard to write it all down with specific positioning: edit - astute observers familiar with roman numerals may notice that my practice character is named "practice tinny xxi" but the few videos i posted of my real run is "tinny xxiii." RIP edit 2 - another extremely major headache is on the ashen bridge in ashen maw: https://youtu.be/FRJyeFIzc1o, also originally recorded just for my own reference. as the video description says, even though some of it looks random, every single aspect of it (very specifictrap positioning, where to throw sparkcrackers) was figured out over many many failures and works 100% of the time.

"stat spreads" - does this mean something other than just stats? for stats, i'm a boreal dwarf 10m 13d 11c 18+1p 17i 8r, background aristocrat (to help pass all sorts of dialogue checks). i found being a boreal dwarf with maxed perception to be absolutely critical to beating hauani o whe solo with my tactician/skaen setup - it was the main megaboss i had worries about so the stats are a little bit single-purpose into taking out that megaboss ooze. i try to max out stealth as my primary skill, though some RNG messed me up and I had to put a point into mechanics to pick a critical lock with only 1 lockpick (instead of 3), though my planned-out-route involves me respeccing a few times to get the right skills needed to pass some encounter checks (two most critical respecs is athletics 6 + unguent of animalism to climb up the wall at hasongo quietly, and mechanics 4 to deal with traps at Hohina Ravine (lagufeth quest).

i'm still at it, but slowly so I don't completely burn out. I don't know about anyone else, but the way I'm doing it is extremely repetitive and tedious (basically breaking it up into easily-rehearsable and heavily pre-planned chunks), so I can only do so much at a time without needing a break to play something more mindless like division 2. At least it's not as bad as PoE1 the ultimate, which was mostly just attrition and I literally started a different "just for fun" PoE1 run in the middle of it just so I could actually enjoy the game.

1. priests are nowhere near PoE1 and that's a good thing. some poe survey showed priests as like one of the most under-selected class amongst the player base, which is a shame, because priests were frankly amazing in PoE1, straight out of the gates. Devotions in PoE1 was also stupidly obscene with its +20/-20 acc buff/debuff. 2. that's not why priests are "fine", those are why priests are powerful. 3. see this complaint a lot, and I wonder how many people would generalize this to all casters. Honestly I never have a problem with priest cast times - my main complaint was the litany/prayers, and they fixed it in a patch by giving them almost insta-cast. 4. i've debated this at length on the forums, so I don't really care to relitigate it, but I don't think priests are nearly as homogenous as people make them out to be... it might just be an artifact of underplaying priests. If you only occasionally play a wizard in BG, you might always take sleep/mirror image/fireball as a "safe" good choice and then wonder why wizards are so homogeneous. same thing I suspect here. I think both the PoE1 survey, an early Deadfire telemetry tweet, and my experience with numbers from WoW show that people in general tend to avoid support classes, so I don't think the underplaying is a Deadfire-specific phenomenon but may limit perspective. 5. Druids have always been a better healer. The difference is that by and large they have to do theirs over time. Priests have ways to more instantaneously influence the fight, either with direct heals like restore/holy radiance/minor intercession/light of eothas or indirect effects like BDD/Withdraw. They do have Consecrated Ground, but the position is stuck where you cast it, which is more limiting than druids (though a side benefit is that you can't counter priest heal over time with Fire-keyworded abilities). 6. Priests aren't expected to be top notch damage dealers, though they can have a decent niche. 7. Priests are: top-tier party buffers/dispellers, revivers; second-tier debuffers, damage dealers, healers, cleansers, and arguably summoners (chanters obv best, but I find there to be massive utility in Spiritual Ally). If you play on lower difficulties or without challenges, the impact of buffing or revives maybe so muted because you can just brute force your way through fights, at which point yeah, sure, maybe you can do better debuffing/damage with a wizard or healing with a druid.

josh's talks are always interesting, and i agree that that post-mortem was very interesting and quite revealing. it is disheartening to see just how much of a quicksand ship-to-ship combat was - i was definitely in the "has promise, but can you tweak more?" camp and now I feel like I was part of a black hole destroying more productive developer time. at this point I mostly appreciate it as a crutch to get easy XP on PotD with challenges, so from a cost-benefit and overall "works with the game" perspective, it would've been better if feargus hadn't overruled josh's decision and we just had boarding combat (which would've been perfectly fine IMO). re: full VO - I hope this isn't as much of a future trap as Josh makes it out to be. I had a sense that full VO was expensive, but had no idea how demanding it could be of everyone's time, not to mention not realizing the effect it has on locking down writing and narration polish and changes. Maybe players will be more forgiving of games without full VO as games can demonstrate how much more they can do when they aren't blowing lots of cash and time and locking in early writing to support full VO. But maybe the die is cast for the next few years now, given the pathfinder feedback.

ha, no worry about that, i'm testing everything. even trivial run-around-for-fetch quests part i rehearse a minimum of two times (one for pathing, one for dress-rehearsal) to make sure there's absolutely no mistake about even hitting the wrong dialogue option. super tedious, but after an early attempt where i did the Upoho Wharo Woods on Maje Island and hit the wrong option and instead of getting Wise Teeth Necklace I entered a fight that was rapidly fatal, I'm making sure everything is pre-planned and well-known. it does mean RNG can throw me off a bit (rain actually briefly messed me up, you can see at video below at 15:56, from the video description "a random bit of RNG hit this real run (versus the practice runs) - it rained! Normally I never pay attention to weather, but it meant that when I was trying to rob the shield off the rack in Sacred Stairs, instead of just the one guard who I could barely sneak past, it was an entire crowd. Yikes! I waited a bit to see if the rain would clear, but ended up burning a Sparkcrackers to clear the area. I made a note in my quest pathing journal to buy a replacement Sparkcracker later.") on the other hand, it also does mean that I have a precision with my pathing that I can tell if something is slightly off. in video below (at 2:16) as soon as I saw the slaver ship, I knew it was a little bit closer than my practice run and thus outside my "Safe to enter dunnage" range, so I had to burn some time to let it go away.

boy that's good to know. i was planning on just stealthing it to complete cornett's call and come back later, i didn't realize the longer ranged weapons could outrange the giant cave grub. i think at level 14 the little grub adds should be no problem. i forget - does the appearance of the cave grub adds get triggered by an ability? i was planning on solo-ing fire dragon by just spam-mule kicking it which will prevent it from bringing in oozes. killing the giant cave grub should also help by being a good burst of XP just from the bestiary bonus (i wonder if the ultimate provides any XP for accomplishing objectives?)

i have not considered it, but the idea of burning up any potential "wasted" time on exploration xp is a not bad idea, though in practice the XP is not huge. (though preferable to trying to roll the dice with some ship combat). the problem is that even with stormwind sails on my ship, it takes days to traverse a small part of the map, and I'm trying to be conservative with how much time I'm using because I haven't mapped out act iv yet and frankly a lot of the sailing targets are really far away (nemnok and BoW are pretty much on opposite ends of the map). if i can nab them while going to those points, that would be something, but sailing really has to be "productive" in every way, and not just for a handful of extra experience.

i think i've figured out a way to get to level 16 without much pain - it requires altering the latter part of my act 2 pathing (fortunately my real character was only just about to do that section so I don't have to reset) and "exploits" the partial experience you get for some quest objectives without actually completing them. it still requires some optimistic assumptions about what quests i can handle safely via stealth and or what fights a level 14/15 tactician/skaen can take without salvation of time, so we'll see what i can do with my practice character. it also assumes that if you finish an act extremely quickly, all of that time also gets transferred to the next part, eothas-wise (and not a few days' worth) because it turns act 3 into beelining between hasongo, stealthing old city (no giant cave grub fight), somehow stealthing hanging sepulchers, and then beelining straight to and completing ashen maw (fire dragon should be solo-able if you can stealth past all the other encounters) and hoping all the remaining 20+ days of act iii transfer over to act iv instead of being "wasted." if i miscalculated XP or some of my assumptions about what quests i can handle via stealth are off i think the only remaining route is to do ship bounties as i come across them while sailing aorund to motare o kozi/tikawara/fort deadlight/dunnage which unfortunately seems like it's going to add a significant RNG element to the challenge. edit - if all this still proves to be untenable i think blood mage or troubadour + skaen might end up being a better choice just to have a better pre-level 16 game, though it sounds like raven darkholme/victor_creed is having their own challenges with those setups pre-level 16.

did you get Great Soul for everyone but your priest?

I would recommend build 2, as devoted, over build 1. While I doubt you can craft enough scrolls to do build 1 without a druid, you can probably craft just enough so that you have backup fire greatswords where corrode isn't good enough. Greatswords have problems with +PEN, so a devoted's passive +PEN bonus would be really really helpful. a Berserker doesn't work as well with a priest as it would in build 1 with a druid, because a priest can get Champion's Boon, which provides the same +PEN bonus that a berkserker gets. So a Devoted will get you +2 (passive), +2 (tenacious) for +4 PEN on your greatsword.

The Ultimate flips on all god challenges, the most important (for this purpose) being Eothas challenge, which provides a firm deadline for all major crit path quests. So I wouldn't even call it an "implicit" deadline. It's a very explicit deadline.

my test character is sitting at ~level 14 at the start of act 3, and i'm steadily rehearsing and getting my real character up to that point. not a lot of risk involved, there's one hairy stealth sequence in tikawara, but otherwise should be harmless. i'm in the process of recording/uploading as i get up. i'm guessing i'm going to be in a similar boat to victor_creed. my test character is stuck because i'm trying to figure out a way to reasonably safely get up to level 16, and once skaen hits level 16 the possible fights you can take really open up (including bosses). but until then a tactician/skaen is still pretty iffy.

Summons whacking yourself is how I did it in tests. (it's very slow and tedious and you need some passive regen and you will shatter any armor you wear, but you really don't need armor in such a setup tbh)

i actually summoned them all up to see: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/priest (sorry was gonna copy-paste but it's in a table format, scroll down and look at the Incarnate column) it's odd that magran gets a special minor avatar - i haven't noticed if any of hte other priests get something special. well, they got one: the sword. though as a quarterstaff-wielding waelite from poe1, count me as a little disappointed that only one of each spiritual weapon was preserved in deadfire. i think spiritual arquebus, quarterstaff, morningstars would all have been fun to have (mace not so much).

Favorite: Load times do not explode in length as you progress further in the game. Seriously. Would significantly amp up my enjoyment of PoE1 if they ever fixed that (is unity bug i think). Top three runner-ups: 1. Being able to move melee-range characters around without triggering disengagement attacks, so long as they stay within melee range. just such a great quality of life improvement, makes tactical positioning both less absolute, and makes melee combat more fluid. 2. affliction/inspiration system. it's hard to fully express how much of a mess afflictions/buffs were in poe1 and this went a long way into rationalizing all of that, in addition to giving non-priests a way to interact with afflictions. 3. keywording, when done right. Most personally disliked: Power-level and ability-level scaling. There's merit to it, but man is it super murky, with unintended and inconsistent consequences. Top three runner-ups: 1. keywording, when done poorly. 2. inversions, when implemented incorrectly. *cough* disposition scaling *cough*. sure you could trivialize grazes in poe1, but at least most players could do the basic math off the top of their head (though poe1 also had a lot of hidden complexity here). 3. bullet sponginess of megabosses and DLC bosses. hard technical fights I like, but please don't force me to repeat the technical aspects over and over and over for tens of minutes for a typical (non-cheesy) party setup (dorudugan is worst offender). I had enough of that when I ran 40-man raids for World of Warcraft.

during some of my rehearsal runs, for this reason, Halt became a really useful spell (second to Withdraw). Essentially, withdraw mostly became an "oh-crap!" insurance spell, because with halt and a decent duration i could essentially make vela a non-factor - for a tactician specifically if vela is far enough away, you don't even need to withdraw her to de-aggro enemies (just shadowing beyond) since she never entered the fight. it's also relevant because if vela is safely away from enemies and not constantly withdrawn, i can buff her with BDD/salvation of time, because in a pinch i can then use vela to tank (mostly relevant in situations where i could be otherwise getting hit with lots of interrupts or if i want to avoid being flanked). (that being said, in at least one of my rehearsal fights, due to some mistakes I did end up significantly appreciating infinite withdraws as a failsafe)

Storytime folks:

I don't know about anyone else, but doing these runs kinda requires you to have lots of metagaming knowledge, and at least for myself i'm doing rehearsal runs with a different character for each "chunk" of my main run. so in practice, it doesn't add much annoyance, just extra precaution. (though i haven't watched raven/victorcreed's stream much so don't know if they are doing ship-to-ship battles. i am explicitly avoding them because i think with wael it's basically a severe game of russian roulette. i imagine if you actually do want to do them or get caught in them, wael debuff would be extremely annoying)